You know what day it is.

[Kai]

I'm staying far away from the news and people who watch tv today.

[Sir Squid Diddimus]

Oh god.
Thanks for reminding me.


(not being a jerk, for once, or sarcastic)

[Kai]

Got a small taste of it on NPR this morning, thankfully brief and tasteful.

No one around me has brought it up so far.

[Brotep]

Oh, crap.  That's right.

[Suu]

My friend: I think the terrorists have won, because people are too wrapped up in re-living past events and letting them into their psyche about something that happened 8 years ago. I, for one, like not letting things like that affect me at all. In fact, I forget about it until other people remind me of it every single year on this date. And then I forget again on 9/12.

[AFK]

Palin on her Facebook page blames Obama for denigrating 9/11 victims because he dared to compare the cost of the Iraq War with the cost of Health Care Reform.  And because he did it a couple of days before 9/11.  Because people still think 9/11 and Iraq are related somehow. 

[Remington]

My friend: I think the terrorists have won, because people are too wrapped up in re-living past events and letting them into their psyche about something that happened 8 years ago. I, for one, like not letting things like that affect me at all. In fact, I forget about it until other people remind me of it every single year on this date. And then I forget again on 9/12.

The terrorists did win, as soon as the US declared the War of Terror. They're like trolls: if you feed them, they win.

[Rumckle]

Thanks, I'd forgotten it was my friends birthday.

[Cain]

"The worst thing to do apropos of the events of September 11 is to elevate them to a point of Absolute Evil, a vacuum which cannot be explained and/or dialecticized. To put them in the same league as the Shoah is a blasphemy: the Shoah was committed in a methodical way by a vast network of state apparatchiks and their minions who, in contrast to those who attacked the WTC towers, lacked the suicidal acceptance of their own death - as Hannah Arendt made clear, they were anonymous bureaucrats doing their job, and an enormous gap separated what they did from their individual self-experience. This 'banality of Evil' is missing in the case of the terrorist attacks: the perpetrators fully assumed the horror of their acts; this horror is part of the fatal attraction which draws them towards committing them. Or, to put it slightly differently: the Nazis did their job of 'solving the Jewish question' as an obscene secret hidden from the public gaze, while the terrorists openly displayed the spectacle of their act. The second difference is that the Shoah was part of European history; it was an event which is not directly linked with the relationship between Muslims and Jews: remember Sarajevo, which had by far the largest Jewish community in ex-Yugoslavia, and, moreover, was the most cosmopolitan Yugoslav city, the thriving centre of cinema and rock music - why? Precisely because it was the Muslim-dominated city, where the Jewish and Christian presence was tolerated, in contrast to the Christian-dominated large cities from which Jews and Muslims were purged long ago.

[...]

The spectacular explosion of the WTC towers was not simply a symbolic act (in the sense of an act whose aim is to 'deliver a message'): it was primarily an explosion of lethal jouissance, a perverse act of making oneself an instrument of the big Other's jouissance. Yes, the culture of the attackers is a morbid culture of death, the attitude which finds the climactic fulfilment of one's own life in violent death. The problem is not what the 'insane fanatics' are doing, but what the 'rational strategists' behind them are doing. There is much more ethical insanity in a military strategist planning and executing large-scale bombing operations than in an individual blowing himself up in the process of attacking the enemy. Yes, the ultimate aim of the attacks was not some hidden or obvious ideological agenda, but - precisely in the Hegelian sense of the term - to (re)introduce the dimension of absolute negativity into our daily lives: to shatter the insulated daily course of the lives of us, true Nietzschean Last Men. Long ago, Novalis made the perspicuous observation that what an evil man hates is not the good - he hates evil excessively (the world which he considers evil), and therefore tries to hurt and destroy it as much as possible - this is what is wrong with the 'terrorists'. Sacrilegious as it may appear, the WTC attacks do share something with Antigone's act: they both undermine the 'servicing of goods', the reign of the pleasure-reality principle. The 'dialectical' thing to do here, however, is not to include these acts in some wider narrative of the.Progress of Reason or Humanity, which somehow, if it does not redeem them, at least makes them part of an all-encompassing wider consistent narrative, 'sublates' them in a 'higher' stage of development (the naive notion of Hegelianism), but to make us question our own innocence, to render thematic our own (fantasmatic libidinal) investment and engagement in them.

So rather than remain stuck in debilitating awe in front of Absolute Evil, the awe which stops us from thinking about what is going on, we should remember that there are two fundamental ways of reacting to such traumatic events, which cause unbearable anxiety: the way of the superego and the way of the act. The way of the superego is precisely that of the sacrifice to the obscure gods of which Lacan speaks: the reassertion of the barbaric violence of the savage obscene law in order to fill in the gap of the failing symbolic law. And the act? One of the heroes of the Shoah for me is a famous Jewish ballerina who, as a gesture of special humiliation, was asked by the camp officers to dance for them. Instead of refusing, she did it, and while she held their attention, she quickly grabbed the machine-gun from one of the distracted guards and, before being shot down herself, succeeded in killing more than a dozen officers....Was not her act comparable to that of the passengers on the flight which crashed in Pennsylvania who, knowing that they would die, forced their way into the cockpit and crashed the plane, saving hundreds of others' lives?"

Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real.